Writing for spiked, Malcolm Clark asks “Why did it take two child-sex scandals for questions to be raised about Scotland’s leading LGBT charity?”
Clark begins: “The biggest LGBT organisation in Scotland is in trouble again. In the past few years, LGBT Youth Scotland has been accused of pushing gender-identity ideology on severely autistic primary-school kids. It has been caught promoting the idea of being nonbinary to disabled youngsters. It has even faced calls to be banned from classrooms altogether, after it lobbied to reverse Scotland’s ban on puberty blockers. Incredibly, these are not even the worst scandals to have hit LGBT Youth Scotland.
“Last month, 39-year-old Andrew Easton was convicted in Aberdeen of distributing indecent images of children, ranging in ages from newborn babies to 10 years old. He even tried to convince someone he thought was a 13-year-old boy to send him explicit pictures online. Luckily, his ‘victim’ was actually a police officer.”
“Lo and behold, I discovered an Andrew Easton also happened to have co-authored a pamphlet for LGBT Youth Scotland in 2010. The pamphlet for schools, called Coming Out, was aimed at helping trans young people explain their newfound identity. Strikingly, it was relatively tame compared with the material this bizarre organisation now pumps into Scottish schools.”
“Last month, I challenged LGBT Youth Scotland’s CEO, Mhairi Crawford, to confirm whether or not the two Andrew Eastons were one and the same. A few days later, she replied and acknowledged they were. However, in a press statement, LGBT Youth Scotland insisted Easton neither worked for the organisation nor was a volunteer there.
How someone can write a pamphlet for an organisation and not be a volunteer or paid worker remains a mystery. The pamphlet itself clearly states it was co-written by Easton ‘through facilitated discussions held by LGBT Youth Scotland’. Crawford has since admitted that Andrew was a member of the youth group, where he, among others, contributed to the Coming Out guide.”
“Perhaps LGBT Youth Scotland was so keen to distance itself from Easton because it already has so many other skeletons in its closet. The most infamous example is former CEO James Rennie. In 2009, he was jailed for 14 offences, including producing child pornography and molesting a young boy from the age of just three months old. The crimes took place while he was CEO.”
“From 2003 until his arrest in 2007, Rennie was a leading figure in Scottish LGBT rights. He even became a regular feature at the Scottish parliament, where he was a government adviser. All the while, he was a ringleader of Scotland’s biggest child-abuse network, sharing disgusting images from the LGBT Youth Scotland offices. Those same offices were where the charity offered advice to troubled children and young people.”
After detailing the failure to safeguard against James Rennie, Clark concludes by arguing: “There is only one convincing explanation as to why LGBT Youth Scotland escaped accountability for its child-abuse scandals for so long – because it had the fulsome backing of Scotland’s political elites.”
Worth reading in full.
